


Sam

by UltimateFandomTrash



Series: SPN Hiatus Creations 2018 [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cults, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Minor Original Character(s), Non-Consensual Hair Cutting, Original Character Death(s), Protective Dean Winchester, Season/Series 10, Torture, as a plot device, ritualistic torture, satanic cult
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 11:48:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15412248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UltimateFandomTrash/pseuds/UltimateFandomTrash
Summary: Sam is captured by a Satanic cult, and without Dean to help him, he has to find his own way to get out.





	Sam

**Author's Note:**

> Written for week 9 of SPN Hiatus Creations on tumblr. Prompt: Sam Winchester.
> 
> This story was also inspired by Eric Kripke saying he wishes he could've done a Satanic cult episode.

Sam studied his reflection in the mirror as he wiped the blood off of his face in the crappy gas station bathroom he was in. At least the blood belonged to a now deceased rougarou and not himself. His own blood was elsewhere, staining the lower part of his shirt just above his right hip. He’d been clawed there and before he’d been able to stitch up the wounds some of his blood had trickled down into his jeans. There was a knock on the door just as he started working on scrubbing some of the foul smelling blood out of his hair. The knocking was abrasive, very similar to how Dean would knock, and Sam had left his brother standing just outside the door.

“Seriously, Dean? You know I had to stitch myself up.”

Another knock.

“Just give me a sec, okay?”

The knocking still didn’t let up, and Sam directed a glare at the door. He walked the few feet across the unfortunately sticky floor and opened the door a bit.

Just as he registered that it wasn’t Dean standing outside, something dark, and metallic swelled in his vision, coming towards him, and then there was an impact against his temple that sent him crumpling to the floor. Sam had his gun in the back of his jeans and he tried to reach for it even as he scrabbled away. His head throbbed and his vision started tunneling. The bathroom door was kicked open, a large, muscular man with a crew cut stomping in. Before Sam could reach for his gun the man was stepping on his hand, making Sam cry out. He tried to twist his body in the small space, get his feet in front of him so he could kick, but another man came in, crowding him, making it too difficult to fight. Sam wasn’t sure why he was still trying. He’d lost the moment they’d gotten him on the ground and in the corner. He felt ridiculous, especially since he’d fought off monsters bigger than them. He did what he could. He started screaming, hoping someone would hear him, hoping that Dean was out there somewhere. That earned him a kick in the mouth, his bottom lip bleeding from the impact, and then a kick in the head. Sam felt nothing but pure, utter panic as his vision went black.

 

Deep, rhythmic chanting met Sam’s ears, and he recognized it. It was essentially gibberish, so he was unable to piece together any meaning, but it was clearly a mix of Latin and Enochian. Hearing Enochian always put a bad taste in his mouth, reminded him of the Cage, but here he mostly wanted to laugh at whoever was saying it because they’re pronunciations were all skewed. Their Latin wasn’t much better. But he did nothing, not letting his captors know he was now awake. The sound was coming from all around him, and Sam could pick out at least six different voices - three female, and three male.

He kept breathing deeply and took stock of how he felt: his head was throbbing, there was the thick, coppery taste of blood in his mouth, the wounds over his right hip were aching and stinging, but there were no new injuries. Yet. Sam had a feeling they’d be coming eventually. He was on a table, shirtless, shivers already starting to set in from the cold building they were in. The worst thing about this was that he could feel the coarse rope around his wrists and ankles, so there was no getting out just now. His gun had been taken from him, and the knife in his boot was gone as well, along with his phone.

Sam didn’t open his eyes till he heard a name he recognized. Just hearing it jolted him out of his focused state.

Lucifer. They’d said Lucifer.

A quick look around him showed some of the people he heard, and they were all dressed in black robes, the hoods up and hiding their faces. There was a voice belonging to someone just outside of his view near his head, but he saw others, more than just six. A man and a woman, were standing near the wide, double-doors of the abandoned barn they seemed to be in, knives sheathed at their belts, shotguns in their hands. Guards. The woman was in her middle ages, her face lined, a few strands of gray hair hanging loose around her face, the rest of her stringy hair in a ponytail, and the man was the one who’d whacked him in the head with the butt of his gun earlier.

The two of them shifted their stances, straightening, clearly noticing that he was awake. Sam bared his teeth at them, and then turned his attention to the people who were chanting. Shadows draped them, the candles lighting up the musty-smelling barn doing little to illuminate their features.

Sam heard a  _ shh _ , a whisper of metal against leather as a blade was unsheathed, and it came from near his head. He tilted his head back, having to crane his neck to try and see what was happening. The person at the head of the table, a woman he guessed from her delicate fingers, had unsheathed a knife and was holding it in two hands. The blade was thick, the hilt a smooth brown leather, and Sam recognized it as a Marine Corps fighting blade, similar to one his dad had owned. It struck fear in him, like someone had stabbed ice into his spine, but he was also amused at the tackiness of it all. If he was the one doing a ritual or whatever it was he would’ve used something more elegant looking, something lighter, too.

The woman stepped closer to him, and the others began taking a few steps back. She went around to his left side, and when the knife was over him any bit of amusement he’d had left him. Sam swallowed roughly as it the blade was lowered to his collarbone.

“Wait. Wait! No, no, no! You don’t have to do this! Wait! No!”

He screamed as the knife sliced into his skin and then kept going down, lower and lower, to beneath his diaphragm. The cut wasn’t fatal - it would’ve had to be deeper for that - but the pain still ripped into him. Then the knife was drawn across his diaphragm, parallel to the other cut. As he began bleeding out onto the table he realized what had been carved into him. An upside down cross.

“Cute,” Sam commented through gritted teeth, not sure what to do in this situation. “So what’s this all about?” he asked, though they all sounded much too busy chanting, their voices now ecstatic, to answer him.

Instead of receiving a response, something else was cut into him, a bunch of slashes that were closed off in a circular loop that was too close to his navel for comfort. Going by all the ritualistic themes of this particular kidnapping he guessed that it was a pentacle.

Sam had been too busy crying out through clenched teeth, his eyes closed to notice that someone else had approached him because now a jagged knife was being used to viciously cut away at the stitches in his right side, and then the knife dug deeper, making him tilt his head back as he screamed, his muscles drawn taut. Then, a tube of all things was shoved into him, and he heard dripping from a steady trickle of blood. Someone else was cutting off some of his hair, another person was tearing at the middle nail on his left hand with a pair of pliers. It happened fast, and for that Sam was thankful, but once those pieces of him were taken from him he realized tears were running down his cheeks, his throat aching.

There wasn’t even a pause in the gibberish they were chanting. Sam realized that though this all seemed tacky and they didn’t actually know what they were doing, they were still very dangerous and were clearly willing to go to great lengths to get what they wanted.

Sam wished he knew what they wanted. Maybe they could talk and he could get them to stop hurting him.

A few agony-filled minutes passed, minutes that seemed to stretch into days, pain taking over his mind as it stabbed through him, and then the chanting came to a halt. There was a note of finality to it, and now tension lay heavy in the air, as if they were waiting for something. Sam had stopped screaming in those few minutes, just lay on the table, trying to breathe deeply and learn where the pain ebbed and flowed so he could anticipate it. But each wound seemed to exist in its own realm of hurt, at odds with everything else in his body. Sam knew he’d coped with worse than this, but it’d been awhile since he’d been tied down and tortured. The very vulnerability of it dug up the darkness in his scarred soul, breathing it into life like someone puffing at a small flame to get it to grow. And it  _ had _ grown, till that darkness had spread throughout him, seeming to restrain him down to the table just as much as the rope. Every few seconds Sam had to abruptly cut off his thoughts so they wouldn’t lead to him letting himself die on that table.

He couldn’t die.

Dean was out there.

Castiel was out there.

Sam needed to live.

No matter how much it hurt he was going to live.

“Why didn’t it work?” a masculine voice asked, breaking the thick silence.

Uneasiness spread through the people around him, and Sam took the moment to tell them in a gruff voice, “Your Latin is wrong. So’s your Enochian.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but whatever it is, it’s not going to work the way you’re going about it.”

“Shut up!” someone else ordered him. Sam tilted his head to the right, where the voice had come from, and he gave them a smirk, hoping his eyes were cold and defiant.

A small voice chimed in, that of a young woman, and as she kept talking Sam realized she sounded particularly young, her voice shaking: “C-can we tell him to shut up? He’s Satan’s vessel. Doesn’t he - I don’t know… deserve respect?”

Sam let out a disbelieving huff and frowned, resting his head back down.

_ That’s _ what this was about? How had they found out? It wasn’t like he wore a sign around his neck that said,  _ Hey, I’m Satan’s vessel _ . Maybe it didn’t matter. They were trying to do something involving Lucifer, and they were doing it all wrong, but Sam was not willing to take any chances where the Devil was involved.

Then it clicked. Having him here, his blood, his hair, his nail… They were trying to summon Lucifer.

Sam knew he was locked away in the Cage with Michael, knew there wasn’t - no,  _ couldn’t _ \- be a way to release him again since the Apocalypse had been averted a few years ago, but the very idea that there were people here on Earth who wanted him walking amongst them chilled him to the bone.

“It won’t work,” Sam told them, trying to keep his voice from cracking with fear.

“And how do you know?” someone asked him, their tone harsh; he figured it was the woman who had cut the upside down cross into him earlier.

“I locked him away,” Sam answered simply, not even sure why he was indulging them with answers; maybe it was to stall any more pain being delivered upon him. “None of this is going to work. Even if he  _ was _ on Earth it wouldn’t work. Come on, just… just let me go.”

“Why should we?” the female guard near the door asked lazily, clearly not caring much about any of this. 

Maybe she was only here because a family member or friend was, maybe it was money. But Sam didn’t want to try and appeal to her. He wanted to talk to the woman who had spoken out against him being yelled at. She seemed frightened.

“What is keeping me here going to accomplish?” Sam asked. When no answer seemed apparent he did his best to look at the people that he could, straining his neck. “Hmm?”

They all shuffled awkwardly, and Sam was glad, realized he was gaining control over the situation though he was the one bleeding and tied to the table.

“How about this,” he snarled, “if you let me go I promise I won’t tear each of you apart one by one.”

And in the back of his mind Sam was thinking of Dean. With the Mark of Cain on his arm, if these people were still here when his brother got to him, they were all as good as dead, and right now, filled with the agonies they’d inflicted on him, he wanted them dead, and that frightened him. Sam was meant to kill monsters, but these were people. Maybe some of these people weren’t any different. Certainly they were the same if they wanted the Devil with them.

Though there were eight of them and only one of him, some of them took a half step back, maybe from the confidence in his tone. Sam knew he’d somehow get out. He had to. He wouldn’t be theirs for the rest of his life. The fact that that could happen had scarcely crossed his mind before he decided he needed some way to fight.

“He’s lying,” a wiry man with a nasally voice blurted out, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Lucifer will come. Maybe we just need more of him.”

Before Sam could try to talk reason into him or protest, he was stepping forward from near his feet, and slashing at his jeans, and then he was slicing into his shin with vigor, using a knife he’d had concealed up his robe. He started tearing at Sam with it, as if he was trying to rip his skin off. He screamed, tugging at his restraints as burning flashed through him in a nauseating burst. His wrists were stinging now, hot liquid running over them, but he kept on tugging. One of the ropes seemed looser. His right hand came free of the restraints with a snap, but before he could start working to undo the knots on the rope around his left wrist, hands were on him, holding him down, yelling at him. There were too many words for him to pick up, and Sam tried to bite whenever a hand went near him. After the first person he bit - drawing blood and a cry - they stayed away from his mouth. His arm was forced back down onto the table and he shuddered as a horrific numbing sensation that he recognized spread throughout his leg. Sam screamed as loud as he could so he wouldn’t have to hear the wet, tearing sound that was made as his skin was sloppily torn from him. With tears streaming down his face he realized he’d actually prefer Lucifer doing this to him. The Devil knew what he was doing when it came to torture, and the precision had made it less agonizing.

New rope was secured around his wrist as the man held up his dripping flesh. Sam squeezed his eyes shut, and puffed out terrified, tormented breaths. Even with the blood in his mouth that was trickling out onto his face he could feel his body making too much saliva, and dizziness overcame him.

_ No, can’t get sick. Can’t get sick. Can’t get sick. _

If Sam vomited while he was lying on his back like this, he’d choke on it. He figured this Satanic cult, or whatever the hell they were, needed him enough to save him if that did happen, but he wasn’t eager to find out.

There was an atrocious slapping sound as his skin was added to what must’ve been a bowl of some sort, containing other parts of himself.

The chanting started up again, but halfway through it, Sam started up his own chanting in Enochian. But it wasn’t meaningless babble like theirs was. In fact he was telling them to fuck off. But they didn’t know that. Still, they stopped, probably fearing what he was saying or trying to accomplish, or maybe it was just that his own words were messing them up.

That earned him a slap across the face, and there was a squeak of protest from the young woman. Through half-lidded eyes Sam saw her small, pale hand reaching out to him, her fingers trembling, before she drew it away.

“He’s right,” the woman near his head said. “This isn’t working.”

Someone started drawing their hood back in defeat, but their wrist was grabbed before they could reveal themselves to him. The person who’d grabbed at him nodded at him as if to say it was too dangerous to show their faces in his presence. The man lowered their hands, understanding the message.

One by one they started leaving the barn, neglecting to untie him, to remove the tube from him, to do anything to make him more comfortable as he bled and hurt. Then he was all alone, the wind whistling through the cracks in the old wood of the barn once their footsteps had faded away.

As much as Sam hated them, as much as he wanted to kill them, as much as he hoped they’d never come back, he didn’t want to be alone. It’d been years since he’d had any hallucinations, but being alone, especially after an attack like this, was surely enough to make his own soul start preying on him.

And it did.

He couldn’t even make sense of all the excruciating memories that flooded him in that dark barn. There was blood and screaming and crushing and breaking and Lucifer laughing. He hadn’t heard the Devil’s laugh in a long time, but now it was like he was right beside him, his breath billowing into his ear. Clearly the cult, the very nature of what they were, had brought many of this back. And as he lay there, struggling in silence, face reddening as he hyperventilated, his hands and feet tingling as he saw black spots in his vision, he started to smell him. His overwhelming, vile scent that made him gag sent tremors throughout his body and was much stronger than the dust and moldy hay in the barn.

The rattling of the barn door opening broke him from his torment, though the scent remained. He lifted up his head, and saw a curvy figure. The details became more evident as the figure drew closer to him, and Sam saw the pale skin of the girl who’d reached out to him earlier. She had her hood down now, and her dark brown hair was in a french braid down her back.

She seemed nervous to approach him, but she did, coming right up to him. Though she hadn’t directly hurt him, Sam tried to flinch away instinctively.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I… I had to come back and see you.”

“Why?”

“Is it true? Are you… Are you really Satan’s vessel?”

Sam looked at the ropes around his wrists again, thinking maybe he could get her to untie him, and then he licked at his bloodied lip, wincing as it stung.

“Yeah,” he answered, his very sorrow at that fact conveyed through that one word.

“And you locked him away?”

Sam gave an unamused laugh as a memory of throwing himself and the fallen archangel into the Cage flooded his mind. “I did.”

The girl pursed her lips and then turned away from him and began to pace.

“I didn’t want to be part of this,” she explained. “My boyfriend - he thought - well, I don’t know what he thought… but he talked me into this, said his father had told him about a demon he’d spoken too, and they’d talked about Lucifer and how he’d bring peace. It all sounded like a load of shit to me, but… but he...”

Her voice was shaking again, and Sam could hear a sob building in her throat.

“Did he hurt you?” Sam asked.

She said nothing, didn’t even nod, but he heard a whimper as she tried to hold in a cry and realized he’d been right. She wiped furiously at her eyes, and went on, “I-I guess he was -  _ is _ \- part of this stupid cult, or just doing it for money or something. H-he wanted me t-to join. So here I am.”

So she had been afraid. Sam knew he’d sensed hesitation from her, had sensed something that didn’t fit in amongst everyone else.

“What’s your name?” he questioned.

She turned to him, rubbing at her cheek with the sleeve of her robe.

The girl answered, “Madeline.”

“Okay, Madeline. I need you to get me out of here, okay? And then I’ll take you somewhere safe, somewhere out of the way. I’ll contact my brother, and we’ll make sure these people never hurt you or anyone else ever again.

“Are you gonna kill them?”

“Yes.” Madeline breathed in sharply, and Sam went on to question, “What are they doing now? Are they going to come back? Are they planning something?”

She said nothing, and in the candlelight Sam saw tears glisten on her cheeks.

“Madeline,” he snapped, hoping his sharp tone would snap her into focus. “What are they doing?” he reiterated.

“P-planning. Trying to figure out another spell. They don’t believe you. I’m scared. What they’re planning… I-it’s worse.”

“What did you hear?”

She shook her head, turning to walk away from him again, a hand over her mouth.

“Madeline, what did you hear?”

“You don’t want to know, okay?” she cried, abruptly facing him again. “You don’t want to know.”

He nodded as best he could while tied to the table.

“Alright. Alright, well, it doesn’t have to happen, okay? You just have to get me out of here, and-”

Footsteps sounded, just outside the door.

Madeline instantly began tearing at her robe, and before Sam could protest, the heavy, black cloth was being shoved into his mouth, making it so he couldn’t speak.

The cult was back, with the two guards as well. Heat flushed through Sam, but he didn’t struggle now, knowing he was already growing weak from blood loss, could feel it in his quickened pulse.

The man with the crew cut, the one with the shotgun thrown over his shoulder, grabbed Madeline upon seeing her and pulled her hood back over her head, admonishing her for showing her face. Though, someone else gave her some quiet praise for gagging him, and thankfully there were no questions as to what she’d been doing there.

They began to encircle him again, but Madeline was still with crew cut, reaching up to give him a kiss. As she did so Sam saw her reaching for the knife sheathed at his hip. She did so slowly, probably to minimize any sound from the movement. It wasn’t a big knife, and she slipped it inside her robe as she pulled away. So that was her boyfriend.

Sam glared at him, really wanting to punch him in the face even more now.

Once Madeline fell into the circle the chanting started up again. It was lower this time, almost sultry, and a hand was reaching out to him. Sam’s mind came up with all the horrors that were about to be done to him and he much would’ve preferred if that bony hand held some kind of weapon.

Then, Madeline let out a cry, shoving them aside, and she sliced at the ropes holding his ankles, and then one around his wrist. Before she could reach over and get to his other wrist there was more movement, shoving, yelling, a choked cry, and she dropped to the ground, the Marine Corps knife sticking out of her abdomen. Sam widened his eyes in surprise, but jumped into action nonetheless. He kicked out, trying to keep the cult members off of him as he undid the rope on his right wrist. Once he freed himself he rolled off of the table. His vision went black for a second, and he nearly collapsed, but before anyone could grab at him, he was heading towards the woman with the shotgun. Sam needed it if he was going to win. It was seven to one, and there was no way he could beat them with just his fists.

He was too close to shoot, and Madeline’s boyfriend seemed hesitant to fire at him, so Sam’s life wasn’t at stake at the moment. They needed him, or they thought they did. Crew cut grabbed at him, an arm around his neck, the other pressing against the tube stuck into his side. Sam let out a tormented yell as he punched the woman in front of him and reached for her shotgun. He let out a vicious cry, whacked his head back into the man holding him, and then kicked, aiming for his crotch. A pained grunt let him know his aim had been true, and he thankfully fell away from him. Still trying to wrest hold of the shotgun, Sam kicked the side of the woman’s knee. There was a crunch as she went down, and the gun was now in his hands.

It had all happened in a matter of seconds, but the cult members were on him now, nearly too close to shoot.

Sam did so anyway, aiming for their chests, not really feeling like having blown up heads to deal with. Hot blood splattered him with each cultist he killed, and soon they were all lying dead at his feet.

Sam dropped the gun, breathing heavily, and he made his way over to Madeline, who had taken cover underneath the table. She was still alive, whining in pain. Sam shoved the table aside, fell to his knees and cradled her in his arms, a hand pressing hard against the wound in her abdomen. The hilt still sticking out of her, which was good. It minimized the blood loss. Still, it was a large knife, and Sam knew it had hit internal organs. She was going to die.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he soothed. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, tears streaming down her face. “I’m sorry. I… I don’t even know your name. T-they didn’t tell me… your name.”

“Sam,” he supplied gently.

She gave a small smile, and then a sob that shook her body left her.

“I’m sorry, Sam. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, hey, hey. Sh… Sh…” He pulled her closer as she weakly reached out for him. Her blood was completely soaking his hand now, running through his fingers. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

She nodded, moaning, and Sam pressed down against her abdomen harder, tears in his eyes, blurring his vision.

“Thank you, Madeline,” he choked out. “You saved me. You saved me.”

As he said that last word there was a rattling inhale and then a short exhale. In a matter of seconds, her bright eyes turned glassy and her soul leaving her.

Sam slid her eyes closed, looking down at her round face as he murmured, a single tear rolling down his cheek, “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”

He carefully placed her body down on the ground, and then there was a yell as Dean barged in, pistol at the ready. His eyes were wild, and Sam breathed a sigh of relief at seeing him.

“What the hell happened?” his brother asked, looking around at the dead bodies in surprise. “Some douche knocked me out at the gas station and when I came to you were gone.”

“Satanic cult,” Sam simply explained, climbing to his feet.

In his weakened state he almost fell, and Dean ran over, putting his gun away. He threw one of Sam’s arms over his shoulders and then wrapped an arm around his waist, helping to support him.

“I took care of it,” Sam got out.

Now that the adrenaline rush had faded he was finding it very hard to remain standing.

What happened next was all a blur to him really. After patching up Sam somewhat and getting him into one of Dean’s clean shirts, his brother found his gun and his phone, and then set about digging a grave for the bodies.

Sam demanded they give Madeline a hunter’s funeral, vaguely explaining that she’d saved him. He didn’t want to explain how she had, didn’t want to relive any of that.

By the time the night was in that restless darkness an hour or two just before dawn broke Sam was standing, with Dean’s help, in front of a pile of burning logs, Madeline’s body atop it. Flames licked at her, lighting up the cold night.

“You ready to go?” Dean asked.

“Just give me a minute.”

He nodded, and remained silent. Sam was glad his brother seemed so calm about all this. He knew inside he was probably raging, the Mark of Cain burning like a fever on his arm, but there was no one to kill, and he’d already taken care of Sam as much as he could for now, so now there was nothing to do but wait, and Sam was grateful he was doing that.

He felt self conscious saying any of this out loud, didn’t want Dean to ask questions, but he did anyway, “Madeline, I’m sorry about the life you got forced into. I know more than anyone that that’s not easy. I do. But you still made your own choice. You were brave - incredibly brave - and without you, I… I don’t think I’d be alive. Or I’d still be tied down in that barn. I hope that wherever you are you’re happy, that you’re with the people you love. And I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I won’t forget you.” Sam swallowed roughly, his eyes misting over, and he forced himself to finish even with the guilt wrapping a jagged, steel vise around his heart, “I promise.”

With those final words he turned away, Dean helping him limp over to where he’d parked the Impala.

He didn’t start the engine at first, and they both sat there in dark silence.

“Sammy, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It was.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he argued, looking at him, and grabbing his shoulder. “None of that is your fault, okay? I don’t care what they wanted with you, or-”

Sam cut him off, “They wanted me because I’m Lucifer’s vessel.”

Dean said nothing.

“So tell me how that’s  _ not _ my fault. It  _ is _ , Dean. Even, even after we averted the Apocalypse and I got out of the Cage, this crap is  _ still  _ following me, it’s still getting people killed. I am what I am, Dean. So yeah, it really is my fault. That girl, Madeline, she’s dead because of me.”

“Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare! Look at me. If anyone is getting people killed right now, it’s me. I have this damn Mark on my arm ‘cause I was too stupid to ask to read the fine print, and you’ve already seen what it can turn me into. Yeah, I did it to kill that bitch Abaddon, but you know what? All this shit I’ve caused? That’s on me. It’s because of something  _ I. Did. _ ”

Sam was just shaking his head, running a hand through his hair.

“No, no. Dean, you don’t get it.”

“Hey, look at me.”

Sam refused to, so Dean shouted, “Look at me!” When Sam finally did so, he went on in a softer voice, “It is not your fault that you’re Lucifer’s vessel. It is  _ not. Your. Fault. _ Those people who kidnapped you, they were crazy, fanatics. They were sick in the head. They were all the things that you are not. You are  _ good _ , Sam. And I know you’re hurting, but you gotta stay that way. Please, I need my little brother to stay good. I need you to be a hero.”

“So, what? I just forget about all that?” Sam asked. “I don’t know if you noticed, but they tortured me, Dean!”

His brother sniffled. “Yeah, I know. I know. But you’re still you. You’re still Sam. Still my research-loving, nerdy, compassionate little brother. I know you. And I know you tried to save that girl. I know you did all you could because that’s what you do. You are Sam fucking Winchester, and you’re gonna get through this. You always do. Now come here.”

Dean pulled him into a hug, and Sam grunted from the pain that throbbed and pulsed through him at first, but he hugged him back despite that. He needed to hug him. He was relieved he was with him, grateful that he’d taken care of him, and even though he had that Mark on his arm that sometimes terrified Sam to no end and he had memories of him going after him in the bunker with a hammer, he loved him. He loved him to death, and he was glad he was there with him in that moment. He didn’t feel his words now, but he knew he would later, and they’d help him through some of the darker days ahead.

Dean was right.

Sam was going to get through this, and he hoped his brother was right about him. He hoped that he’d still be a good person when he came out the other side. He wasn’t always that person he wanted to be. But he’d try for Dean. He’d try for himself. He’d try because it mattered, because the world needed him to. Sam wasn’t going to let this turn him into someone he wasn’t.

Sam was Sam, and after everything - the demon blood and the possessions and the torture and the assaults - he was going to stay that way.


End file.
